I think I need to attach two screenshots to explain what it the current behavior.

Of course, you need to open the screenshots at 100% with PhotoShop for instance to get the point.

Again, it's just an article withthe PDF rendition.

Screenshot 1:

This is the screen when I arrive on my page. You'll see that the text is kind of blurry.

Then I zoom-in (pinch) just a little bit. Maybe by 1%, and I obtain this:

Screenshot 2:

The quality of the text is MUCH better once I zoom-in a little bit. That's why I feel that the viewer is rendering the PDF only if you zoom-in. Otherwise, it looks like it's using something else (like a JPEG renditon of the PDF page).

My request is: Could the viewer just launch the PDF rendition even if the reader doesn't zoom-in ? Then I would obtain automatically the quality of the second screenshot.

PS: It looks like this forum will resize my images and that we won't be able to feel the difference. I've just uploaded the original screenshots here:

I don't think that's accurate -- I experience what Michael does. On a PDF folio, when you get to a page, the type looks a bit pixelized/jpeggy. It never "pops in." Enlarge it just a bit and the PDF/vector-ness pops in, segment by segment. When you pinch back out to 100%/full view, the text goes back to its slightly pixelized version. Boy it would be nice to have the text look crisp at 100%, when most people will see it.

So -- is there something we are doing wrong, that our text never "pops into" focus in a PDF folio? (this is on an ipad3, with v18 tools)

I haven't seen this failure of PDF pages to redraw before zoom since I installed the v19 viewer in which renditions work properly. I haven't tested 1024 folios on the iPad 3 -- just 2048 folios. I'll ask around to see if there was a fix.

I've noticed the same issue viewing 1024 PDF folios on the new iPad. We haven't tried any 2048 folios yet because all of our clients run on the iPad2. The text looks like it has choppy JPEG compression but even a slight zoom cleans it right up to how it should appear.

Existing InDesign document that has been set to new size of 2048 deep.

All content has been scaled up to this new size

Rescaled images are now half the effective pixel value. For the next live issue they would be to the iPad3 resolution.

Folio has been exported in PDF format.

As yet there is no Adobe iPad Viewer to test our hires mag only this laborious sideloading method where single articles can be viewed but not the mag as a whole (folios have to be located in a hidden Temp folder). As the desktop viewer doesn’t display PDF folios as a workflow it is impossible.

Although the text looks great on iPad3, rext within interactive features (like the sliders) doesn’t zoom in high quality.

Also on pages with full page pan/zoom images moving to next page difficult.

We need a new Content Viewer and we need it fast! We want to be able to boast that our next issue (Photographers i Magazine) has been built from the ground up to support retina display.

I don't understand. The custom Adobe Content Viewer is a regular Content Viewer with cloud-based folios. The Adobe Content Viewer you custom build can do everything the store version does, plus it lets you use Preview on Device. You just need to make sure that you include the iPad UDIDs of your developers in your dev mobileprovision file, and you can give everyone the content-viewer.ipa file and have them sideload it to their iPads. They don't even need to remove the store version of the Content Viewer.